Style icon brings cool to Cardiff; Meet the fashion legend who is helping a new club become the coolest around.

Byline: GAVIN ALLEN

ONE of Wales' greatest style icons is using his impeccable taste and bulging contacts book to help a new Cardiff club become the city's coolest nightspot.

Chris Sullivan has worn many guises during his career: as a pop star with Blue Rondo A La Turk in the '80s; as the owner of Soho's influential but now-defunct WAG club; as a fashion designer, journalist and painter.

Since the WAG closed down in May 2001, Merthyr-born Sullivan has been out of the nightclub game, preferring instead to concentrate on his journalism career, writing for the likes of The Independent, The Times, GQ and Loaded.

But when a friend took over what is now Tabu nightclub on Westgate Street in Cardiff last month, Sullivan was persuaded to open his little black address book once again.

Tabu's opening night DJ line-up included former Stone Roses and current Primal Scream bassist Gary 'Mani' Mounfield and Dexy's Midnight Runners mainman Kevin Rowland, as well as Sullivan himself.

And when actor Rhys Ifans' band Y Peth finished their tour last weekend, Tabu hosted their celebration party.

Despite his overdue return to the club scene he is keen to be at arms' length from the running of the club.

"After the WAG I wanted to do something entirely different," says Sullivan, 47, who lives in London with his partner Leah, his young son Finbar and a cat called Not Nancy.

"The problem with my club was having to be there until five in the morning and never seeing daylight.

"It seems a fabulously glamorous lifestyle when you have people like David Bowie or Naomi Campbell in your club, but then you have to look after those people.

"If that type of person walks into a club at 3am they want you to shut the doors and get the champers out and stay until late."

However, when Sullivan was asked to consult on a friendly basis by Tabu's Richard Cordle, who did so much to make the former Soda Bar such a cool haunt, he accepted.

"I said yes because I will only be there occasionally, it's not like London where they will call me on my night off," he sighs happily.

The future line-up of DJs looks set to include Norman 'Fat Boy Slim' Cook, Boy George, Terry Hall, Jerry Dammers, Norman J and Suggs as well as live bands. Tabu, like Soda Bar, will be a members' club with a selective public door policy which Sullivan is happy to defend against claims of elitism.

"The one thing that drove me away from Wales was fighting with people.

"It would always be about clothes and sometimes you would get hit before you even spoke to someone.

"You only need one cool, fashionable person to be punched by one drunken oik and it can all be over. That's why you have a door policy, to protect the good people inside."

Sullivan's clothes have always - deliberately - attracted attention, from wearing a mother-made vinyl T-shirt around Merthyr in the pre-natal days of punk to shunning New Romanticism in the '80s for '40s-style American Zoot suits.

Sullivan was among the people who started the New Romantic look and while he denies overall responsibility for it, he admits his part.

"If there was a group of people who turned their backs on punk and started dressing in a more filmic way, then I was among them, yes," he says.

"But no one person can take credit, it would be like claiming to have invented the wheel."

With his flamboyant fashion sense it's amazing to think of Sullivan on the streets of his native Merthyr, strutting like a peacock in a tiger's enclosure, and it was the fact that he became a target in Merthyr as a teenager that pushed him to such a successful career.

"I did it all because people always told me I couldn't do things," he says.

"People said: 'You can't go to art college. You can't be a fashion designer. You can't run a club. You can't be in a pop band. You can't be a journalist'.

"But as someone once said, these things are 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration and I hope it shows young people in Merthyr that they can do anything they want."

For now, all Sullivan wants to do is help make a success of his friend's club and he is certain that Cardiff has enough glitterati to support an elite nightspot "To make a great club all you need is interesting people and Cardiff is full of those."

CAPTION(S):

STYLE GURU: Chris Sullivan, and on the cover of NME in the '80s

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Publication:	South Wales Echo (Cardiff, Wales)
Geographic Code:	4EUUK
Date:	Jul 12, 2008
Words:	771
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